Agribusiness Specialist Group

Agribusiness & Talking Shop

The Agribusiness Group aims to foster interaction between members who are concerned with agribusiness and related activities. The Group was built around regular monthly 'Talking Shop' sessions, originally held at a pub in Oxfordshire.

Since January of 2014, Roger Cozens has taken over responsibility for the group. He has been hosting the lunch time 'Talking Shops', which enable sharing tales of travel, successful projects and disasters, topical issues, IT
tips, business opportunities and more. Its objectives are to improve networking
and to overcome a major problem for those not working in a large organization –
the need for regular contact with like-minded consultants.

This has proved really
successful with regular meetings and a good number of people attending. As
well as sharing information on opportunities for consultancy work it has also
led to links with other work in development. For example, Roger is hosting an inward
mission of arable farmers from Serbia in June 2014 to visit producers, millers and
processors of gluten free grain, spelt and rye. Also they will visit examples
of vegetable box schemes. They are keen to develop more links in the field of
gluten free production including buckwheat.

The new location for future
meetings (starting 3rd July 2014) will be the Bowd Inn, Bowd Cross
Sidmouth, Devon EX10 0ND. This is a
lovely venue, has good food and is easy to find. It moved from the earlier Exeter venue. which was
found to be difficult to access in the city centre and too far to the west of
the county.

Meetings will be on the first Thursday of the month, 12.30 for
13.00. Everyone is welcome.

The Agribusiness Group used to be a member of British Expertise. Membership was of particular value to younger members who were in active employment. We have now terminated our membership to British Expertise, mainly to save the expanse of the annual subscription.